Globally, all leaders today are focusing on sustainable growth, trying to ensure that their organizations’ products/services are selling. Thus, making it imperative to understand and analyse the selling skills and challenges of the modern world.

In this context we recently conducted a webinar on “Changing Landscape of B2B Selling Skills in the VUCA World”, hosted by Dr. Amit Pareenja, Principal Consultant, InspireOne, Ms. Prrasanta Nayeer, Vice President , Government Business , Vodafone Idea and Mr. Sanjay Narula, Head of Corporate Sales (B2B), Titan

Here are the snippets of the insights shared –

Changing Customer Needs

The customer is more informed now, and the need is constantly evolving. Consequently, a sales executive needs to understand the customer’s needs: the occasion, the user of the product, the budget, the timeline. With these details, the sales executive can gauge the competitor and offer a tailorized product to the customer. Post pandemic, a transformation has happened within organizations and in the external space. Technology adoption and digitalization are creating a myriad of opportunities for various organizations across the length and breadth of the country. This is where growth lies and sales teams need to align their tasks with opportunities. However, there are limited people in sales teams, which calls for an optimization of resources used to pursue opportunities, through efficient qualification of leads and opportunities.

Building Capability and Managing People

From a leadership perspective, building the capability of the sales team is crucial. The responsibility of building a positive work culture that fosters recruitment, coaching and mentoring, lies with the leaders. The definition of KPI has thus changed from Key Performance Indicator to ‘Keeping People Informed’. Transparency and people connect is critical, while understanding individuals’ potential and leveraging individual strengths. Furthermore, there is a need to set detailed robust processes which aid smooth working, to prevent any negative effects of attrition. By leveraging technology, we can simplify the processes and have a knowledge bank for individuals to lean on.

Changing Measures of Success

The measures of success comes in the form of the level of customer engagement. If satisfied, the customer then becomes a promoter. The second success measure thus, is the referral through social media. Customer retention is another important indicator of success. Hence it was evident from the discussion that Sales Heads today are focussed on Role Based Learning for their teams, where the must have and Go to have skills are blended together to deliver its impact an experiential learning environment. This impact can later be measured through Data analytics on the Deal Velocity, Funnel Adequacy and Product penetration etc measures that would definitely see an improvement with enhanced focus and structured way of doing negotiations, objection handlings, closure discussions with customers. It also came out in the webinar that Brand and Product value proposition needs to be tailored with the need of the customers and hence knowing your and your audience profile and communication styles becomes very important.

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